Wonderful World. Beautiful People. The Caffe del Centro

 

We ate at that Italian restaurant in Merida I mentioned. We brought friends. It was pretty good, all in all. It was amusing that the menu and the walls were plastered with the bona fides of the restaurateurs: Maps of New Jersey. They used to live in New Jersey. Case closed, they thought.

Everyone working there was Mexican, of course. Because of television, people everywhere seem to think that the cuisine in the Bada Bing Club must be the finest Italian food in the world. I’ve eaten Italian food in New York and New Jersey many times, and not once thought what I was eating was nearly as good as Federal Hill in Providence, or the old North End, or even Los Angeles, never mind eating in Florence. Amusingly, the greatest Italian restaurant I ever ate in was in a strip mall in Connecticut, and everyone in the kitchen was Vietnamese. It’s a funny old world.

So we staggered out into the night, freighted with Garden State/Yucatecan saltimbocca and British gin, the four of us an instant gang instead of a pair of wanderers. We shimmied down the slender sidewalk in the evening twilight towards the Caffe del Centro. Andy the tout saw us coming from a half a football field away, and started his convivial bombing run early, calling out to us to try the ice cream that could make a stone Madonna weep tears of joy.

Andy stopped short when we hove into visual acuity range. It struck him, I think, that these strange norteamericanos weren’t fibbing like everybody else. We had returned. His smile went from incandescent to supernova, and he called out our names like an old friend, which I guess he was. We’d known him for almost eight hours now, making him our best friend in the city center.

A good tout knows his lane, and doesn’t stray. Andy started his spiel again to entice us to try the ice cream. I held up my hand in mock anger, and explained that if he went inside and got reinforcements and weapons, they still couldn’t keep us out of that place without taking casualties. Queremos helado! Queremos helado aqui! Queremos helado ahora!

You’ll notice that Caffe del Centro isn’t Spanish. Caffe is Italian for cafe in English. The owner turned out to be a Sicilian. His name was Fabio, because of course his name would be Fabio. Everyone who worked for Fabio in the restaurant was Cuban. I’d been trying desperately to expunge all the Italian I knew from the back pages of my mind, longing to replace it with Spanish that would do me more good in Merida. I still suffered the occasional Romance language pratfall and burped out Io when I meant yo, and adesso when I wanted ahora. Now the tables were turned, and I wanted to resurrect the fallen language, and had a deuce of a time. I did manage to annoy Fabio in two languages that he spoke perfectly, and finished him off by annoying him in English when I ran out of everything else. Io non parlo l’italiano molto bene, amici, mah io capisco l’italiano un po. Mi moglie vorree gelato!

I told Fabio I was part Sicilian, and told him my grandparents’ name, which made him cross himself, I think. The beautiful women behind the counter plied us with little samples of their flavors, and then we climbed the stairsteps of their portion size. They offered a shot glass and we shook our heads. Cone? Nope. Little dish? Keep going. I bought tubs of everything for everyone and we sat in their charming forecourt and had a hell of a time eating their wonderful ice cream, or helado, or gelato, depending on which language you were butchering at the time.

I asked the young lady server what the biggest propina (tip) she’d ever gotten. She told me, and I slapped 50% more on top of it and made her day, I hope. She desperately tried to tell me something, but my Spanish engine blew a gasket and left me stranded in the breakdown lane of the communication highway. She may have told me I was a handsome, wonderful person. She might have told me I was standing on her foot. I know which way I’d bet.

Then Fabio gave me the biggest compliment I’ve ever received, except this one time when my wife told me I wasn’t a half-bad husband. Fabio called out from the back of the store: Man of la Mancia! “Mancia” means tip in Italian. It was the second time in my life I was called that. My wife and our friends went to Florence, Italy, once, over 25 years ago, the only other vacation my wife and I have ever taken. My buddy Eddie and I tipped everyone like mad because before the Euro, the lira was like Monopoly money compared to dollars and it was easy to be generous. I remember Emmanuel, the concierge at the hotel, telling us they called us Men of la Mancia everywhere we went, because it was so rare.

We laughed, joked with the staff, and posed them all for pictures like family, and generally annoyed the other customers, who sat and wondered what sort of imbeciles could have that much fun eating ice cream.

It’s easy to explain, really. Wonderful world. Beautiful people. The Caffe del Centro!